Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.
Log in Create free account100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.
Leadership & Diversity—A Fireside Chat with Dantley Davis
Summary
Join us for a special "fireside chat" with Dantley Davis, Chief Design Officer at Twitter. We hosted a live conversation about Dantley's own path of becoming a design leader, diving into his influences and lessons learned along the way. We also discussed what it means to enable greater inclusivity and diversity in our field, particularly in these momentous times.
Key Insights
-
•
Military training cultivated Dan Lee's ability to manage both tactical and macro-level challenges, which he applies to design and leadership.
-
•
An MBA provided Dan Lee with strategic frameworks and a shared vocabulary to better integrate business goals with design decisions.
-
•
Design leadership often evolves organically from consistently delivering quality work and influence, rather than intentional career planning.
-
•
Dan Lee views shared ownership and influence in product development as more effective than rigid role ownership between designers and PMs.
-
•
The ‘tax’ of being a person of color or woman in tech includes balancing job responsibilities with advocating for community equity.
-
•
Intentional diversity hiring requires proactive outreach, relationship-building, and compensation incentives for leadership.
-
•
Authentic, vulnerable conversations about race and inclusion can foster understanding and material change in organizations.
-
•
Designers must expand empathy beyond similar peers to include underrepresented and diverse user groups to avoid narrow product focus.
-
•
Recruitment of diverse talent is not passive; it requires strategic relationship-building with communities and organizations.
-
•
Having leadership compensation tied to diversity outcomes, as at Twitter, helps embed accountability for inclusive hiring.
Notable Quotes
"My dad told me very early on in my career that I had to work two times harder than anyone else to get the same things."
"Ownership needs to be shared. The craft of making is similar to raising a child — it takes a village."
"I approached design not from the context of user experience first, but from what job we’re trying to satisfy for our customers."
"There were things I controlled and things I didn’t, and I needed to plan for both."
"It was a tax I had to pay my entire career — balancing the work and trying to lift my community."
"Every manager who works with me knows their responsibility includes sourcing candidates for diverse backgrounds."
"If you don’t have those challenges, it’s a lot easier to make it in the corporate world."
"You need to ask, who are you excluding in the conversation? That’s the disservice to empathy."
"I made an explicit choice: we’re not making any offers until we’re interviewing women."
"Designers who come out of US tech need to pivot quickly toward broader inclusion or risk being outpaced by other markets."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Having big ears means listening more to others than to yourself during a performance."
Jim KalbachJazz Improvisation as a Model for Team Collaboration
November 6, 2017
"We look to work with authors we like and enjoy being around because writing a book is a long, collaborative journey."
Louis RosenfeldCoffee with Lou: Should You Write a (UX) Book?
March 7, 2024
"I kind of think of it one as like fields of influence — staff influences the team or pillar, principal influences organization-wide."
Catt Small Micah Bennett Brian Carr Jessica HarlleeWhat's Next for ICs: Exploring Staff and Principal Designer Roles
February 22, 2024
"Typically we get stuck answering the questions we know we can answer but lose the chance to see the big picture."
Marieke McCloskeyUser Science: Product Analytics & User Research
March 11, 2021
"User recordings are your most valuable asset but have become riskier due to biometric privacy laws."
Llewyn Paine[Demo] Deploying AI doppelgangers to de-identify user research recordings
June 5, 2024
"You don’t want to overdesign just to make something more data interpretable because that can lead you down a dark path."
Joshua NobleCasual Inference
October 6, 2023
"We need to think about who we’re sharing with, how they might react, and what motivates them."
Sara LogelYour Colleagues are Your Users Too
March 29, 2023
"Learning is a marathon, not a sprint, especially in the context of online conferences."
Bria Alexander Louis RosenfeldWelcome
January 8, 2024
"Consistency is so important that sometimes even consistency in failure works if it means I only have to learn the workaround once."
Sam ProulxOnline Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
June 7, 2023
